What did you think was the most interesting, innovative and exciting developments we talked about in 2008?
If I had to pick something that actually shipped this year, it would be Intel's SSD drives. Those things are the new hotness. Still a bit pricy, and still a bit small, but two of these in RAID 0 can saturate a SATA controller. Consistent latency even in random accesses, no need to defrag, and significantly reduced fear of mechanical failure are great things indeed. The improved responsiveness of the system is quite nice and definitely noticeable when moving back to mechanical drives.
If we don't restrict it to things that are available, but only that we have seen ... well there are some really cool things out there. Having watched stereoscopic movies at IDF and seen stereoscopic games at NVISION, I suspect we all might start wearing glasses more often. Hmm ... I wonder if polarized contact lenses are a good idea. Probably not.
One of the innovations I really want to get my hands on is Lucid's Hydra technology. They claim near linear scaling with multiple GPUs regardless of the game. We sort of have our doubts, as do AMD and NVIDIA. But wouldn't it be cool if they could actually pull it off? A vendor independent multiGPU motherboard that scales better than both CrossFire and SLI in all cases? That'd be very cool.
2008 was quite a year in graphics with new architectures from both AMD and NVIDIA. The unexpected success by AMD with RV770 was quite impressive and really threw NVIDIA's pricing for a loop. Which is great for the consumer. With high performance graphics cards available at good prices, pervasive DX10 hardware, and OpenGL 3.0, OpenCL 1.0, and DX11 in the pipe for the next year or so, it is a good time to be into computer graphics. It's taken a while but we are seeing PC games that surpass console games, and we expect the gap to widen quite a bit in 2009.
Here's to technology, and happy new year. Let us know what you think is the coolest stuff that happened in 2008 and what you are looking forward to in 2009
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punjabiplaya - Sunday, January 4, 2009 - link
I am pretty intrigued by Ion and the pocket projectors. Mobility will rule.mckirkus - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link
I'm guessing the story of '09 will be SSD RAID. Something about seeing a CPU becoming the limiting factor for IOPS makes a lot of people happy.As reliability increases RAID 0 will become the norm and I'm guessing mfgs will start selling bundles of 2+ drives in ready to boot PCI-E cards to bypass SATA-II limitations.
I'd like to see a review of onboard RAID chips vs. entry level SATA RAID cards. I want a blacklist of drives using the evil JMicron controller. And I want it all benchmarked using IO-Meter and real world benchmarks.
These things are all going to max out SATA-II in a few months on the read side. I want to see random write IOPS benched.
Roland00 - Sunday, January 4, 2009 - link
Seconded everything he said.Zak - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link
SSD and using GPU for general computing. No doubt these are the two techs I'm waiting most for to mature and become affordable and mainstream. I'm a gamer and heavy Photoshop user.Z.
cactusdog - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link
For me the best of 2008 was the Mr T Flavour Wave Oven...followed by SSD's.Bonesdad - Saturday, January 3, 2009 - link
SIT DOWN, FOOL!shin0bi272 - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link
I have to give the nod to the Lucid Hydra. The ability to mix different gpus' of the same make and get near scalar performance increases out of the addition of that video card on any game not just ones that support crossfire or sli sounds like the biggest advancement announced this year. SSD's have been around for years they are just now making it to the consumer market and dont cost $1000/gig anymore. The hydra gives average people (not just those with more money than sense) a tangible reason to run multiple video cards. They even have a laptop version in the works as an external box... how cool would it be to be able to carry around a dual, triple or quad sli solution and plug it into your laptop?!PrinceGaz - Saturday, January 3, 2009 - link
Lucid's Hydra also sounds too good to be true to me. All very exaggerated talk with no working product, rather like Bitboys in the 1990s. I certainly wouldn't put any of my own money behind them.Penti - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - link
It's really about software if they can't handle all the DX calls and mojo they do correctly it will be a mess. Their demo did just support dx9 for instance. Sounds like a awful lot of work, making it work with every game problem free. It basically sits between the driver and game.shin0bi272 - Monday, January 5, 2009 - link
it does sound too good to be true yeah. But IF it is then it would be awesome. And for those who didnt look at their page again after being announced here on anandtech..."October 29, 2008 — LucidLogix Technologies "Lucid", the provider of the recently launched multi-GPU HYDRA technology, today announced it has secured $18 million in Series C round of funding from Rho Ventures. This investment is the largest to date, bringing total capitalization to $32 million."
So they have 32 million dollars to do .... something.... with.
I mean the technology is pretty simple. Its a chip to put on a motherboard or in an external box board that intercepts the command going to the video card and it sends it to the one that either has the ability to render that pixel (like if you have a DX9 and a dx10 card and the instruction is a dx10 instruction the dx9 card cant run it so it has to go to the other card) or the card that is ready for another instruction. The problem will be convincing motherboard makers to cast their lot in with lucid instead of the big juggernauts in nvidia and amd.